Thursday, May 21, 2015

Meet Ahmed Mohammed. He might be the most expensive hot dog vendor in New York, especially if he thinks you're a tourist.NBC 4 New York cameras recently captured him trying to charge a man named David $15 for a hot dog and a pretzel near the World Trade Center.

"I said, 'What are you, a crook?'" David later told NBC 4 New York. "I'm not a tourist, so I know the price in New York."Customer after customer recounted how the vendor tried to charge them $20 to $30 for a hot dog.~snip~

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Kirsten Powers’ new book, “The Silencing,” nails it by showing just how bad things have gotten for free speech in America. It’s going to get a whole lot worse, and I’ll explain why.

Powers has dubbed today’s intolerant purveyors of leftist causes the “the illiberal left” because, as a liberal herself, she sees them as anything but liberal about allowing a voice to those who don’t toe their rigid line. Her book catalogues and analyzes the dehumanization and demonization techniques the illiberal Left applies towards anyone who dares to veer from their rigid narratives. Their sacred cows include abortion, climate change, same-sex marriage, and second-wave feminism. Dissenters are systematically smeared and destroyed.

There is no small irony in the fact that the crazed reaction from the illiberal Left to Powers’ book demonstrates the very behaviors and attitudes she critiques. Social media immediately erupted with a hate-fest and swarmed Powers on Twitter, in exactly the manner described in her book. It’s yet another exercise in promoting groupthink and suppressing freedom of expression by those who want to tell us all what we must think.

But I would add that most of this is coming straight out of the Left’s holy of holies: the LGBT lobby (whose agenda Powers happens to support.) Because next up on the LGBT hit parade is the literal silencing of America—with the force of the federal government behind it.~snip~

I really don't think it matters to the commie/left which cause they can use to create laws stifling speech just so long as they can find a way to stop people from saying things they don't like for "social justice" to create hate speech laws.

Once that happens the doors are open to anything deemed hateful and then we'll see people censoring their own thoughts out of fear that they will articulate them. The idea that our society seems to be OK with this is really what's alarming.

One of the authors of a recent study that claimed that short conversations with gay people could change minds on same-sex marriage has retracted it.

Columbia University political science professor Donald Green’s retraction this week of a popular article published in the December issue of the academic journal Science follows revelations that his co-author allegedly faked data for the study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support of gay marriage.”

According to the academic watchdog blog Retraction Watch, Green published a retraction of the paper Tuesday after confronting co-author Michael LaCour, a graduate assistant at UCLA.

The study received widespread coverage from The New York Times, Vox, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others when it was released in December.~snip~

I've always found it kind of strange that all these "polls" supposedly indicate majority support for homosexual marriage and yet not one state has managed to enact homosexual marriage legislation through a popular vote.
I think we're just now discovering why.

On CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” President Barack Obama said he was most proud of “saving the American economy” and he is”very confident that America is stronger, more prosperous, safer, and more influential today than it was when I took office.”

The president said, “I’m proud of saving the American economy. We still have a long way to go. Essentially what we did was stabilize it, lay a new foundation to move forward. As I said in the State of the Union address, that gives us, now the capacity to tackle what was an overriding theme of my campaign way back in 2008. And that is to restore middle class economics and the capacity for people to get into the middle class and start seeing higher wages and a broader shared prosperity inside the United States.”

“Internationally, I’m proud of the fact that we’ve responsibly ended two wars. Now, people will say, well, you’re back in Iraq, but we’re not back in Iraq with an occupying army, we’re back with a coalition of 60 countries helping to stabilize the situation,” he added.~snip~

Saturday, May 16, 2015

A federal jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death Friday for his part in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that left three people dead, and for the murder of an MIT police officer as he and his brother attempted their getaway.

Tsarnaev showed no emotion as he learned his fate and stood with his hands clasped in front of him, his head slightly bowed. He faces death by lethal injection.

"My mother and I think think that now he will go away and we will be able to move on," said victtim Sydney Corcoran after the verdict. "Justice. In his own words, 'an eye for an eye.'"

Corcoran nearly bled to death and her mother lost both legs.

The 21-year-old faced the death penalty or life in prison for his role in the April 15, 2013 attack in which two pressure-cooker bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.~snip~

If we're not going to proceed with swift and certain justice here then it would be a lot cheaper on the taxpayers to just give him life without parole.
Not that I'm against the death penalty but we're looking at decades before its carried out so if they ain't going to do it right away then why not let him rot?

While reporting on, and aggressively defending the Clinton Foundation from numerous scandals and ethical issues, George Stephanopoulos, the star and poster boy of ABC News, hid his own conflict of interest from viewers. According to Politico, Bill Clinton’s former war room soldier and press secretary, the current anchor of “Good Morning America” and “This Week,” has donated at least $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

This is a bombshell of a black eye for ABC News.

Since ABC News hired Stephanopoulos as its chief anchor and chief political correspondent, many questioned how a former-Democrat operative could remain neutral in the role of a news anchor. Even before Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 presidential race, on numerous occasions Stephanopoulos exposed himself as a Democrat operative working as a news man.~snip~

Old George has been carrying water for the democrats for quite a while and his biases are pretty apparent. What's really surprising is that that he and ABC think they can minimize the damage already done by simply bowing out of the debates.
They're not taking into account that now any political reporting he does will be tainted by his obvious left-wing biases.
If he's going to shill for progressive/commies that's fine but ABC shouldn't let him do it under the guise of unbiased journalism.

Monday, May 11, 2015

I played baseball as a kid but watched football mainly because it;s what my dad would watch on the weekends. So I never caught the baseball bug, but I had plenty of friends and family who did so I understand the uniqueness of the game.

You look around the internet and read a lot of opinions on New England's deflated balls.
While I agree that it probably wouldn't have a made a whole lot of difference in the playoff game with the Colts I'm not so sure that is the point.

Cheating is cheating and if the league perceives it that way then there must be some kind of consequence. If not then why have rules at all?

BOSTON (CBS) — The Patriots will kick off the NFL’s 2015 season on Thursday, September 10 at Gillette Stadium against the Pittsburgh Steelers, the night they are also scheduled to raise their Super Bowl XLIX banner. However, quarterback Tom Brady won’t be the one taking snaps under center in that game.On Monday, the league announced that Tom Brady has been suspended four games.In addition, the Patriots will have a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017 taken away. The team will also be fined $1 million.“We reached these decisions after extensive discussion with Troy Vincent and many others,” NFL commisisoner Roger Goodell said. “We relied on the critical importance of protecting the integrity of the game and the thoroughness and independence of the Wells report.”~snip~

The NFL hasn't had a real good year in the media as far as integrity goes what with all the domestic abuse allegations and a perceived failure to address it. Even though the NFL's primary business is football. The concussion settlement and the failure to place an openly gay player regardless of his abilities to play the game.

But in this instance they have every right to enforce the rules and should. Otherwise the game could go the way of professional wrestling.

Today marks the anniversary of Apollo 13
While we all know how it turned out (I was 16 at the time and watched the drama unfold on TV) there's always the "what if " if they sadly had failed.
In a way it's kind of sad to see what NASA has become under the influence of Obama and the politically correct crowd.
I would hope that it could still solve real problems if need be.

The American job market rebounded in April, the government said on Friday, helping to ease worries that the economy was on the brink of another extended slowdown after a bleak winter in which the overall economy stalled. But the growth in jobs failed to translate, once again, into any significant improvement in pay.

Employers added 223,000 positions last month, the Labor Department reported, and the unemployment rate decreased to 5.4 percent, a turnaround from the disappointing performance in March, initially reported as a modest 126,000 gain and then revised down on Friday to 85,000.

“We expected a rebound following the numbers in March and we got it, but not much more,” said Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS. “Wage growth is still the missing piece.”~snip~

While they ignore the crushed hopes of Americans who have used up all their unemployment and therefore aren't counted as the unemployed.

In what was an "unambiguously" unpleasant April jobs payrolls report, with a March revision dragging that month's job gain to the lowest level since June of 2012, the fact that the number of Americans not in the labor force rose once again, this time to 93,194K from 93,175K, with the result being a participation rate of 69.45 or just above the lowest percentage since 1977, will merely catalyze even more upside to the so called "market" which continues to reflect nothing but central bank liquidity, and thus - the accelerating deterioration of the broader economy.~snip~

There's a couple of articles out today after the trouncing the Labor party took in Britons general election that should have us all wondering about the integrity of said pollsters. First off Nate Silvers take. Bod added

Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233.

The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: "It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result," the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats' result by roughly 20 seats).

But the problem went beyond the UK. "The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it’s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well." Silver went on to cite four examples where the polls had failed to provide an accurate forecast of the election outcome: the Scottish independence referendum, the 2014 U.S. midterms, the Israeli legislative elections, and even the 2012 U.S. presidential election, where "Obama beat the final polling averages by about 3 points nationwide."

"[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."~snip~

"It's extraordinary that 11 polls on the eve of the election should get it so wrong."~snip~

You gotta wonder why they got it so wrong,
My take is that polling companies, like a lot of government agencies and the media, have become infested with leftists and social justice warriors who's intent is to influence who gets into office by any means necessary.
Including conducting polls in such a way as to get predetermined results and then present them to the public. Since pollsters work so close with the liberal/commie biased media they have an incentive to keep the media happy cause they pay the bills.
In the mean time we get snookered into believing left-wing fantasies and accused of being on the wrong side of history.
If anything these results should be a wake up call to us about the validity of polls and force us to take the results of any poll with at least a grain of salt.

Pamela Geller, the woman behind the Texas cartoon contest attacked by two gunmen late Sunday, knew what she was doing when she staged the controversial event featuring irreverent depictions of the prophet Muhammad in Garland, Tex.

The Dallas suburb had hosted a pro-Muslim conference in January, about the time Islamist terrorists killed a dozen journalists with the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo. Geller, a blogger and fierce critic of what she calls the “Islamization” of America, wanted to make a statement.

So she sponsored the Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in the same exhibition hall as the earlier conference. She and her associates invited 200 people and hired 40 heavily armed off-duty police officers and security guards to protect them.

And then they unveiled the pictures: A drawing of Muhammad on a unicycle. A picture of the prophet with a beard of snakes. An angry Muhammad wearing a turban, holding a sword and yelling: “You can’t draw me!” — a reference to the fact that depicting the prophet is considered blasphemous by many Muslims.~snip~

There's something truly perverse about this kind of victim blaming and sort of eye opening about the fact that there seems to be something of a religious nature that liberals get outraged about.
In their minds you can create provocative art about Christianity.
Force people to compromise their faith,
Marginalize Christians.
But draw a picture of Mohammed and you got it coming.

Friday, May 1, 2015

BALTIMORE — Baltimore’s chief prosecutor charged six police officers on Friday with crimes including murder and manslaughter in the arrest and fatal injury of Freddie Gray, a striking and surprisingly swift turn in a case that has drawn national attention to police conduct.The state’s attorney for Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, filed the charges almost as soon as she received a medical examiner’s report that ruled Mr. Gray’s death a homicide, and a day after the police concluded their initial investigation and handed over their findings. Officials had cautioned that it could take considerable time for her office to complete its own investigation and decide whether to prosecute.Five of the six officers are in custody, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said later.~snip~

There's way to many questions surrounding the death of Freddie Gray and IMO not enough answers. It seems that charges are on the fast track simply to satisfy the rioters and social justice crowd.